The new AdWords (excuse me, Google Ads) Interface rolls out tomorrow, July 24, 2018. Say goodbye to the option of switching back to the UI you know and love. This is happening.
To be fair, Google gave us a lot of time to get used to the new Ads interface. The beta version started to roll out in Spring 2017 for advertisers, giving us over a year to vet the new experience. During the last year, Google has worked on moving all of the features over in waves, even working with advertisers like Seer to understand what we needed to see (one of the perks of being a #PremierPartner).
Where the Key Components Have Moved To
1) All major tabs - Instead of being featured at the top in a left-to-right fashion, Google has moved them to a left-hand navigation bar next to the evergreen campaign navigation.
2) All Search/Display/Shopping/Video campaigns selection is static in the new campaign navigation bar to make for faster pivots when checking in on performance. 
3) Dimensions - While the dimensions tab is no longer part of the main navigation, you can find the same info in “Predefined Reports” in the top right-hand corner under “Reports.”
4) Shared Negative Lists - If you’re the smart cookie who is using account-level negative lists, they’re still there, just nowhere near the Keyword tab. In the top right corner next to “Reports,” there’s a little wrench icon called “Tools.” That’s where the Shared Library can be found, along with the previous features like Keyword Planner.
💡 Pro Tip: If you’re having trouble looking for something, it has probably moved to one of the drop downs in the top right-hand corner or over to the left.
Best Features of the New Interface
The PPC team at Seer has always been a hands-on kind of place, keeping a close eye on keyword bids, ad scheduling, and more. In the last year or so, we’ve put a much larger emphasis on the 3 A's:
This is largely due to the fact that automated bidding strategies have become much more reliable than they were previously, which allows us to spend more time focused on understanding our audience data and customer journeys to provide the best experience for our client’s consumers. The following features help us further our 3 A's initiatives.
Experiments
One of the best components of Google Ads is being able to run experiment campaigns, which is a feature that’s been around for a while. However, pulling data from the experiment campaigns in the old Ads interface was kind of a pain. In the new Ads experience, you can pull experiment data right alongside the original campaigns without having to navigate to a different screen like before.
📌 This is why I personally started using the new interface: TO SAVE TIME
For those of you who don’t know about experiments, you first have to create what’s called a “draft campaign” with different settings than the original campaign. Once the draft campaign is created, you can run an experiment that takes a percentage of the original campaign’s budget to run with, say a 50/50 split test. For more info on experiments and how to set them up, visit the Google Ads Help Center article.
Seer uses experiments to test out new automated bidding strategies (alongside Manual CPC campaigns to control any initial volatility).
More User-Friendly Than Ever
The new Google Ads features were designed to help you make decisions quicker and easier. The new interface is also filled with tons of insights that will help advertisers keep a better pulse on major performance changes.
Two of the most obvious changes are:
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The net new Overview Tab
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The new Recommendations Tab (previously Opportunities)
Both of these tabs show quick snapshots of opportunities related to budgets, keywords, bidding and more. If you only have a few minutes each day to check into your accounts/campaigns, make sure to work these two tabs into your daily routine.
💡 Pro Tip: One of Seer’s favorite changes are how visual reports are now, example above found on the Overview tab.
Audience Focused Features
If you’re familiar with Seer, you know we’re all about ASIC, where the “A” stands for Audience.
That's why we're so excited to dig into strategic opportunities in the new Landing Page tab to help us more quickly understand if the content we're landing our audience on is actually helping them solve their problem.
And more than that, updated features in the Audience Manager (found under “Tools” in the Shared Library) now includes Audience Insights and Audience Sources. This can help you pinpoint non-utilized audiences that have a higher chance of converting based on their behavior.
Sure, it’s never easy to move to a new tool, especially when you’ve been doing something one way for over 10 years. But sometimes, change is good, people.
And if you’re still not sold on the new interface, you now have the ability to change the widths of your data columns, and updating the date range has become a lot more user-friendly. It's about the little things, am I right?
